Want your album reviewed by me?

I've done some review work for some places online. I've decided to do a montly ezine reviewing albums from underground hip-hop heads. I don't know how long this will last, because i'm not sure how much of my time it'll take up. But for now, I'm looking for review any and all albums. The review will be published on my personal website meaning you can quote me and if a person wants to verify that quote they can see it from a source. HHI used to do this and charge $20 a review, I'ma do it for free, just because I'm trying something. If you have a site or whatever all I ask is a link to my site somewhere on it. Here's some links to some of my reviews:

Now before you get too excited, I am not going to do anymore then a 500 words review and I WILL NOT do a song by song breakdown. To tell people the truth I'm trying to build up my review portfolio so I can make some extra dough doing this, and I figured this is the best way to do it. So trust me, your reviews will be crisp and professional. [That does not mean i'm going to save negative comments if I have them.]

If it's a hardcopy e-mail me and I'll give you my po box. If you got it somewhere online I'll just review that and save you and me time and money.

I will be posting the reviews in little review issues. So once i finish it i'll prolly mail it to you and then wait until i decide to publish an issue before i put it up.

I got an album...but i don't know how i would send it to you...i'd have to buy it myself and send it to you...lol...wich i'm not gonna do..... : (

unless a zip file works.....

Click to expand...

That's fine as long as my e-mail will take it. Which it has a 250 MB storage capacity, so it should work... I would get on AIM but I have connection pockets (one of the problems with stealing a connection,) that disconnect me every 2-3 minutes, so i can only download stuff using download accelerator because it'll pick up.

E-mail is punkraprecords@yahoo.com ... If you want to break it down to 62 kbps that'll be fine and i won't say anythign about the sound quality since i'll expect it to not be the best then; i don't really pay attention to that anyway...

In 1997 The Wu-Tang Clan released Wu-Tang Forever. I bought it the day it was released and listened to it non-stop for many weeks. One song I listened to more than I ever listened to my parents was "Impossible.” “Impossible” was a song about living in a futuristic police state, similar to George Orwell’s, 1984. At the time, I was naive, and I thought that that world was impossible (pardon the pun).

It is now a new age. However, rap music, which has always been the first to scream foul along with punk, but rap music, has not made much noise about the changes going on in the world. In the mainstream, you have Jadakiss, Common, and Nas. In the underground you have Immortal Technique, Sage Francis, Paris, Saul Williams and Non-Phixion. And that’s pretty much it. So there’s absolutely more than enough room for revolutionary rappers out there. And that’s where a man by the name of Grime gets his first mention in his own review.

Let Freedom Ring With a Buckshot is a must for anyone who considers themselves revolutionary, in the political sense. With seven of the nine songs on the album being completely filled with anti-establishment lyrics, and the remaining two being a drop in a bucket not too far away, it’s no wonder I instantly thought of Grime as an artist with the intellectual ability of Nas and the revolutionary content of Immortal Technique. Even the way he attacked the mic reminded me of those two artists, and that’s not a bad thing.

Although no song on this album is wack, there are some songs that standout. To start, “Holding Hands” which sets off the album nicely, makes a call for people to rise up against the system and follow him to possible death. Grime’s style shines through on this track. I feel the anger and urgency in his voice. He convinces me he’s not playing, which is exactly what the number 01 track should do.

On “Everywhere is War,” Grime raps, “what’s the difference between bombs dropped from a plane/ And a suicide bomber hopping onto a train?/ It’s all the same…” Then he goes on to say, “Why they never mention that plane that crashed in Queens?/ They murdering Iraqies for cheaper gasoline.” Lines like these spark a listener to think and are plentiful throughout the album.

“The Revolution Is Here” is the most rounded track on the album. A primo type scratching chorus accompanies Grime’s revolutionary lyrics. I could see a track like this being used at the beginning of a Spike Lee movie as you see people protesting in the streets.

The one non-revolutionary song that stood out to me was “Loneliest Number.” Although I’m not a big fan of “Kanye West” stretched choruses (and there is a good number of them on this album), I did find myself enjoying the stretched sample used on this one. It felt right as Grime rapped about the pain he’s feeling in his life for an unnamed girl.

The final cut on the album, “On the Whitehouse Lawn,” is the best track on the album. It doesn’t matter that it lacks a real chorus; this is Grime at his best. Blending perfectly with the beat, and dropping lines of revolutionary truth like, “So who’s the terrorist that’s scaring American’s?/ With national security and gay marriages/ There’s Big Brother cameras in ghetto areas/ They always watching, like the eye on the pyramid.” This song is the perfect way to end an album leaving the listener wanting more.

There are only two reasons I won’t be giving this album a perfect score. First, Grime rarely switches up his style, except on “Karma” and “Thrill Is Gone”. This causes Grime to not perfectly blend in over a soft beat like the one on the album titled cut, “Let Freedom Ring with a Buckshot”. Second, Grime has a cliché problem. In just about every song he tends to drop clichés like “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.” It only takes a few minutes to flip that cliché into your own and original saying. If it only happened once or twice I would have overlooked it, but it seems to happen a lot throughout the album.

Those complaints won’t keep me from saying this: If you are into revolutionary music, you will be very happy with this album. If you are against radical ideas and thinking – don’t even waste your time listening. If you are a CIA operative you probably already have a file on Grime. Someday this album will get dug up by the survivors of Armageddon, and they will then know that at least one person knew what was going on in the world and tried to stop it. My problem with revolution is man has always been weaker than his ideas. If you overthrow this government what are you going to replace it with? Eventually all power is corrupted, but that won’t stop me from giving this album a 4 out of 5 and one raised fist.